Stateline South Australia

A High Tech Solution to our Electricity Bills

We pay the highest electricity prices in the nation and Energy Minister Pat Conlon says there's nothing he can do about it until 2005.

But as Michael Smyth reports there could be a high-tech solution.

MICHAEL SMYTH: It's a uniquely South Australian problem -- scorchingly hot days, our love affair with airconditioners and a huge demand for power.

For most of the year, there's more than enough generating capacity in SA to meet demand.

But for a handful of days over summer things are stretched to the limit.

That's when the wholesale cost of electricity can skyrocket -- a cost ultimately passed on to consumers.

PROFESSOR DICK BLANDY, ENERGY CONSUMERS COUNCIL: If we can attack that 4 per cent peak, we could in effect half the amount of electricity capacity that's needed for every household in the State, and you can see that that gets to an enormous saving.

MICHAEL SMYTH: Professor Dick Blandy is chairman of the Energy Consumers Council which was set up last year to advise the State Government on energy policy.

He's been looking at ways to reduce the cost of power and says these boxes could provide part of the solution.

They're known as smart meters.

PROFESSOR DICK BLANDY, ENERGY CONSUMERS COUNCIL: These smart meters have two-way communication facilities which can actually target just your airconditioner and turn that off on a revolving basis, let's say 15 minutes every two hours, around the customer network.

Most people probably wouldn't even know that the airconditioner had gone off.

MICHAEL SMYTH: The theory is that if a retailer can reduce demand by remotely switching off your airconditioner, it could avoid spikes in the cost of power and pass on the savings.

CRAIG COCK, ETSA UTILITIES: This allows the retailer to reduce his risk and, hence, can again offer lower prices if the customer is willing to have his load reduced in some way, when there is a high demand on the system.

MICHAEL SMYTH: Craig Cock estimates it'd cost a household between $40 and $60 a year to have a smart meter installed.

That'd cover the cost of the hardware and the collection of data.

CRAIG COCK, ETSA UTILITIES It's divided into two parts, one part actually measures the electricity being consumed electronically and the other part is the telecommunications devices that send the measurements to a remote location.

DICK BLANDY: We have to put in place something like this because it's a very South Australian problem -- the load curves for the other States are nothing like ours, and that's one of the reasons why their electricity is cheaper, and so it's something that we have to address, I think, as South Australians.

MICHAEL SMYTH: But the man responsible for regulating the electricity industry has serious concerns about smart meters, saying their use targets the most vulnerable.

LEW OWENS, ESSENTIAL SERVICES COMMISSIONER: It's trying to get residential airconditioners turned off on a summer's day between the hours of 4:00pm and 7:00pm, because that's when the peak load occurs in the South Australian system.

Now the people who are home in those hours of a summer's weekday are the elderly, the unemployed, parents with children, the sick.

MICHAEL SMYTH: He says a smarter way of reducing the State's demand for power on a hot day would be to encourage the big players to use less.

LEW OWENS, ESSENTIAL SERVICES COMMISSIONER: If we could get the commercial operators in this town -- the operators of shopping centres, of office blocks -- to turn their temperatures up to 23 degrees instead of operating their airconditioning at 19 degrees on a hot summer's day, the amount of demand peak load that we could save would be far more significant than trying to get these domestic airconditioners to change their behaviour.

MICHAEL SMYTH: Lew Owens also warned this week that we can soon expect a big hike in gas prices.

His comments coincided with a meeting of the Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

It's pushing for more Government sponsorship of exploration arguing new gas supplies could lead to cheaper power.

BARRY JONES, PETROLEUM PRODUCTION & EXPLORATION ASSOCIATION: Gas is the prime fuel for electricity generation and the underpinning of the electricity system is the gas system, so the price of gas and the price of transporting gas is the bottom to the price of electricity.

MICHAEL SMYTH: More exploration or not, consumers are being warned to hang onto their wallets.IAN HENSCHKE: And the State Government says while the use of smart meters is an interesting idea, it won't be mandating their roll-out, until the benefits can be proven to outweigh the costs of installation.